Humans

• Angel Dominguez (author, artist)
• Elæ Moss (artist)

ISBN

978-1-946031-89-1

LCCN

2020945708

Page count

100

Keywords

Poetry, Prose, Document, Documentation, Documentary, Photos, Photography, Art, Dual Language, Translingual, Bilingual, Spanish, English, Ancestry, Archive, Family, Queer, LGBT, LGBTQ, LGBTQ+, LGBTQIA, LGBTQIA+, Colonialism, Anti-Colonialism, Imperialism, Anti-Imperialism, Gentrification, Culture, Preservation, US, USA, United States, Mexico, Yucatec Maya, Yucatan, Indigenous, Environment, Nature, Natural World, Politics, Violence

Publication date

2021

Language(s)

Spanish, English

Publication media type

Print Document
Translingual

Publication series

Glossarium: Unsilenced Texts
Kin(d)* Texts & Projects

RoseSunWater

RoseSunWater is a collection of bioluminescent writing that seeks to keep memory alive in the face of colonial gentrification of the city, the peninsula, and the mind. The writing contained seeks to render the spillage of the spirit through ancestral retracings from Los Angeles to the Yucatán, from the orchard to the cenote and back to the sea. RSW is an attempt to finish a poem that Angel’s grandmother wrote, sleep-walking through time and space in search of the recuperation of ancestry, dreams, and a sense of home.

“this is a geography painted against colonialism, against gentrification, against geography itself. an orchard becomes a dzonot becomes a rose becomes a collaborative song between dreamer and bird that bleeds across borders. i was shown ruins through mirrors, nerve endings that survive demolition and burnings and hide underground amongst currents. angel has given us a guide through the dimension just a breath away from the veil.” — Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta

“ROSESUNWATER is a vast and powerful record of dream traversals within the heinous enduring legacy of imperialist colonial settler imposition and erasure. Dreaming is a potent defense and antidote against the violence and upheaval of such a hegemonic world process that has continually sought to annihilate, alienate and displace. Dreams are reality’s generative portals and are an undulating medium inflecting worlds and realms. Within heightened states of consciousness, Angel Dominguez realizes the connective energies and resonances that are capable of reworlding reality. Affinities of sacred presences and kinship relationships are the reticulations of omniscience and guide the dreamer to liberation, affirming collective radiance as necessary for survival. This is a book of glittering intelligence and total love. I’m moved by the depth perspectives culled at the thresholds of the sensitive membranes of identity that coalesce future, past and present. This book breathes fire, exudes floral eminence, dislodges tyranny with wind, water, sun and roses: an entranced ceremony of existence.” — Brenda Iijima

“Angel Dominguez’s poetry is where you turn for that tender and frightening feeling of calling to your past, to your ancestors, to the land that bore you. What answers that call? Your own voice, in an ‘echoic familiarity,’ sometimes unbearable and sometimes ecstatic in its repetitive everyday. In Rose Sun Water, much like in its spiritual predecessor Black Lavender Milk (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2015), Dominguez writes in an ancient personal, a kind of confessional voice that almost obsessively considers both its monumental historicity and its often slow-going present. This is a moving and caring book that pleads for some way to survive, some way to face the past, present, and future of colonialism, racism, environmental degradation, violence, and the police. Like all of Dominguez’s books, it is a loving and hurting dream.” — Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué

“Rose Sun Water fills me with gratitude for Angel Dominguez and his gift — a brilliance limned in a superbly moving book. Rose Sun Water instructs me in the purposes of memory, even of loss. His grandmother’s little house where he grew up, he informs us at the start ‘is going to be destroyed before this book is ever finished.’ Angel Dominguez travels far beyond that house to reconnoiter memory, through the past and loss. In ‘the pyramids my ancestors built’ in Yucatan, with their crowds of tourists, on the roads with their police roadblocks, at Merida, Tulum and the sacred Cenote del Chuhuan he renegotiates the lives that his family left behind. That little house in the Valley north of Los Angeles, for Angel Dominguez, is not a rehash of the nostalgic tropes of Romanticism. In the sacred cenote he finds ‘a gleaming Frito bag floating upon the matte, adventurine green algae that covers the portal now.’ This book does not diminish the impact of gentrification nor the trashing of the body of the land through colonialism; instead, Angel Dominguez instructs us on the uses of memory, ritual and poetry in radically effective resistance against the gentrification of the spirit. If our childhood neighborhoods (our very childhoods themselves) are bulldozed by capital seeking an immediate return, our spirits are likewise gentrified by dislocation and loss, our restless and rootless migration to earn a living, continual movement, education, degrees and ‘self-improvement.’ Rose Sun Water is antidote to the gentrification of the spirit you can hold in one hand, some sweet water.” — Sesshu Foster, author of ‘Atomik Aztex’ and ‘City of the Future’

“The gift of Rose Sun Water arrived to me today at 4:45PM by way of an orange quartz light. When Dominguez writes, ‘All I ever wanted was to be alive,’ everything in my body rearranged itself to receive this light. I welcome its beauty, which is like justice, but sublime.” — Lara Mimosa Montes, author of ‘Thresholes’

“’What does it mean to write a document of light?’ It means this work is a mirror universe, a rose-covered portal across feeling. Through cenotes Yucatecos, Tongva territory, and the Santa Cruz mountains. You are holding a lineage, a fire the poet keeps building ‘writing (remembering) beside the shelter I’ve made for myself in my veins, I keep trying to keep trying.’ The poems become flowers that grow ‘out of what’s missing: rose, sun, water.’ Be prepared to thread your own maps out of what you do not know and wish you could mend. Be prepared to find out how we must make a ‘new sound out of this living.'” — Vickie Vertiz, Author of ‘Palm Frond With Its Throat Cut’

About the Contributor(s)

Angel Dominguez is a Latinx poet and artist of Yucatec Maya descent, born in Hollywood and raised in Van Nuys, CA by their immigrant family. They're the author of RoseSunWater (Operating System, 2020) and Black Lavender Milk (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2015). Their third book, DESGRACIADO (the collected letters) is forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2021. You can find Angel's work online and in print in various publications.

Elæ Moss is a multimodal artist-researcher, curator, designer, and educator. Seeking Speculative Solidarities, they employ analog and digital media to investigate human, institutional and ecological systems and to iterate open source strategies for ecological and social change. Recent projects have shown at La Mama Galleria, EFA Project Space, STWST/Ars Electronica, Usdan Gallery, Judson Church, the Segal Center, SOHO20, Dixon Place, and the Exponential Festival, among others. Select publications include Big Echo, Tagvverk, Vestiges, Matters of Feminist Practice, The Transgender Narratives Anthology, Choice Words: Writers on Abortion, The Brooklyn Poets Anthology, and Resist Much, Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance. Books include Ground, Blood Altas, Overview Effect, Sweet and Low: Indefinite Singular, Bodies of Work, and The Precarity Bodyhacking Work-Book and Guide. Moss is a Professor at Pratt Institute, and the developer / founder of the Operating System + Liminal Lab. More at: https://onlywhatican.net and https://theoperatingsystem.org.